Commercial vs. Independent Content: Power and Scope

Regarding the dimension of their financial and human resources commercial media companies are at any rate much more powerful players than their independent counterparts. Still those reply with an extreme multiplicity and diversity. Today thousands of newsgroups, mailing-list and e-zines covering a wide range of issues from the environment to politics, social and human rights, culture, art and democracy are run by alternative groups.

Moreover independent content provider have started to use digital media for communication, information and co-ordination long before they were discovered by corporate interest. They regularly use the Internet and other networks to further public discourse and put up civic resistance. And in many cases are very successful with their work, as initiatives like widerst@ndMUND's (AT) co-ordination of the critics of the participation of the Freedom Party in the Austrian government via mailing-lists, an online-magazine and discussion forums, show.

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2000 A.D.

2000
Convergence of telephony, audiovisual technologies and computing

Digital technologies are used to combine previously separated communication and media systems such as telephony, audiovisual technologies and computing to new services and technologies, thus forming extensions of existing communication systems and resulting in fundamentally new communication systems. This is what is meant by today's new buzzwords "multimedia" and "convergence".

Classical dichotomies as the one of computing and telephony and traditional categorizations no longer apply, because these new services no longer fit traditional categories.

Convergence and Regulatory Institutions

Digital technology permits the integration of telecommunications with computing and audiovisual technologies. New services that extend existing communication systems emerge. The convergence of communication and media systems corresponds to a convergence of corporations. Recently, America Online, the world's largest online service provider, merged with Time Warner, the world's largest media corporation. For such corporations the classical approach to regulation - separate institutions regulate separate markets - is no longer appropriate, because the institutions' activities necessarily overlap. The current challenges posed to these institutions are not solely due to the convergence of communication and media systems made possible by digital technologies; they are also due to the liberalization and internationalization of the electronic communications sector. For regulation to be successful, new categorizations and supranational agreements are needed.
For further information on this issue see Natascha Just and Michael Latzer, The European Policy Response to Convergence with Special Consideration of Competition Policy and Market Power Control, http://www.soe.oeaw.ac.at/workpap.htm or http://www.soe.oeaw.ac.at/WP01JustLatzer.doc.

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Napoleon

Napoleon I. (1769-1821) was French King from 1804-1815.
He is regarded as the master of propaganda and disinformation of his time. Not only did he play his game with his own people but also with all European nations. And it worked as long as he managed to keep up his propaganda and the image of the winner.
Part of his already nearly commercial ads was that his name's "N" was painted everywhere.
Napoleon understood the fact that people believe what they want to believe - and he gave them images and stories to believe. He was extraordinary good in black propaganda.
Censorship was an element of his politics, accompanied by a tremendous amount of positive images about himself.
But his enemies - like the British - used him as a negative image, the reincarnation of the evil (a strategy still very popular in the Gulf-War and the Kosovo-War) (see Taylor, Munitions of the Mind p. 156/157).

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MIRALab

MIRALab is a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva. Its motto is "where research meets creativity". MIRAlab's objective is to model human functionalities, such as movement or facial expression, in a realistic way.

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